Well, hello everybody. I am back from the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio. I had planned on recording a bunch of content while I was there to show everybody what I was up to, but I didn’t. Mostly because I was too busy. It ended up being a sort of frantic pace, and I just didn’t have the bandwidth to record any content. But that’s okay.
The reason I was at a game fair is what I want to talk to you about today. In the beginning of January, I co-founded a company with some friends. I was there at this game fair, Origins, in order to promote a new game that’s coming out. It’s called Shuffle Dungeons. Actually, I’m going to have my editor, AJ, insert a video introducing the game into the video that this blog post is based on. So hopefully, the sound is not too terrible.
So, this is Shuffle Dungeons. Shuffle Dungeons is a one-to-four-player cooperative dungeon-crawling game. The point of the game is to beat the boss monster at the center of the board. You’re going to want to beat the boss before you run out of cards in your deck. Along the way, you’re going to be collecting various items, including weapons, armor, and spells. What’s really cool about this, though, is that every card is double-sided, which means that you are going to want to decide whether you equip it, make yourself more powerful, or you play it as a room in your dungeon.
The game plays in 45 minutes to an hour, and along the way, you’re going to be fighting against various monsters. Each monster has a zone of control that you’re going to be trying to navigate through until you’re strong enough to beat it. Once you’re able to beat it, it becomes a tile in your dungeon, and you get the loot, which are more tiles that you can play or more items that you can equip to make yourself stronger.
The game also has a really cool puzzle element where you’re able to twist and slide various tiles to create new paths through the dungeon. We’re going to be kick-starting it in the middle of July, so click here if you’re interested in signing up. Shuffle Dungeons is going to be launching on Kickstarter in the middle of July, so only a couple of weeks from now.
Shuffle Dungeons is a fantastic game, and we’ve been getting a ton of really good feedback from it. In fact, while we were at the convention, we did a bunch of demos, and every single person who played it got up saying this was a fantastic game. That was just so encouraging to hear, and we’re really excited to bring it to the general public.
This did also get me thinking about how projects sort of come into existence, how creative projects come into existence, and of the similarities between different creative endeavors, including writing. So writing is very much a… you might call it a self-starting thing, right? If you don’t do the writing, then you’re never going to be able to write anything. That’s really awkward, but the point is that nobody can write for you.
And with most creative projects, that’s also true. You know, people can’t do the work for you, so if you want to design a game, or if you want to make a movie, or if you want to write a script, or a song, or whatever you want to do, you have to be the one to do it. But it’s really hard and exhausting, and often it leaves you feeling really drained.
This makes it really important to surround yourself with people who can give you good feedback, and sometimes that feedback is really hard. You know, this isn’t quite good enough. It’s not quite up to scratch, but sometimes that advice is also really encouraging. Throughout my life, I’ve gotten a lot of really good feedback from people, and the mass majority of it has actually been really encouraging. Even if they were identifying something that they didn’t like about what I was doing, more often than not, people will give me a piece of positive reinforcement as well.
But you can’t live on positive reinforcement alone. You have to actually have a good product, or a good book, or a good song, or a good game, whatever it is. Anyway, that’s just sort of a random musing. I do hope you’ll check out Shuffle Dungeons. It’s a really fun, easy to play game, and we’re really looking forward to the upcoming Kickstarter. I do hope you’ll join us for it.
For right now, I’m really exhausted, so I think I’m gonna go take a nap.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/YDGighB6mvc
Thanks for reading and watching.
Want in on all the secrets of writing compelling books? Have burning questions for Seth about the business side of being an author? Join the email list for up to date info on the latest videos!
"*" indicates required fields